Well, it means if you got in on the community pricing, you’re confirmed and only paying $10 for this baby.

If you get in on it from this point onward, the lowest price you’ll pay is $19.95.

It also means that the book is under development, so the pre-pub is a foregone conclusion. If you missed out, hop on the pre-pub because the price could go up again.

Moral of the story: Check out the Community Pricing page and see if anything piques your interest, because Community Pricing just may be the cheapest way to get access to that book that looks interesting. Perhaps you’d be interested in Driver’s Notes on Samuel (a worthy tome to consider).

Cf. The epistolary definition of J.L. White, “The Greek Documentary Letter Tradition Third Century BC to Third Century AD”, Semeia 22 (1981), p. 91. Besides this primary function, the letter was used for a host of other purposes (e.g. letters of friendship, letters of praise and blame, letters of recommendation, letters of petition, and administrative letters).

Makes me want to read the article. When Semeia is available (hopefully soon!) in Logos Bible Software, I’ll be able to.

If you haven’t considered the Semeia pre-pub, but find stuff like the Theological Journal Library helpful, you may want to reconsider Semeia. It is cited in books, articles and essays, as this citation from Reed shows.

One of the neatest features supported in the next release of Logos Bible Software is the Biblical People database. It has been included in the alpha releases since the end of June, but I wanted to give everyone a chance to see it.

The example here shows a visualization of all of the biblically-attested relationships of Aaron. The graph shows everyone Aaron is related to and the nature of the relationship. Nodes in the graph are colored by gender, if known, and labeled by relationship. Every relationship is attested to by one or more Bible verses, shown at the left side of the graph. Clicking on a person’s name regenerates the graph with them at the center.

The graphs can be generated for any person in the Bible, and a specialized version of the graph is included in the Passage Guide to show all of the people in the selected passage and their relationships to each other.

Logos Bible Software is more than just an electronic version of a paper library. And it is tools like this that demonstrate how software can help you see and explore the Bible in ways you never could before.

Since Bob posted about the sentence diagrammer, I thought I’d follow that up just to let folks know that these groovy new syntax graphs we’re developing (see previous post) are able to be copied into the Sentence Diagrammer.
Really.

See? Click on each image to see what happens. The first image is a right-click and copy (the blue arrows and such indicate what is selected). The second image is the syntax graph pasted into the sentence diagrammer as a live object. Arrows are arrows; words are words. You can grab stuff and move it around.

Small disclaimer: The first graphic shows stuff like “add to general notes” on the right-click menu. At present, it is unclear whether we’ll support notes within these graph resources.

Searching on the name led me to a site with some other, older diagramming systems. The photo here shows Genesis 1:1 diagrammed by the Clark method. (Do we need to add support for this?)

The next release of Logos Bible Software will support flowing columns of text with user-adjustable margins and tabs. It is hard to explain but easy to use, and it is designed to support the outlining / phrasing / aligning / arcing advocated in some recent guides to exegesis. (These diagrams still support the line drawing objects, allowing you to mix shapes and flowing text.)

We are calling these “sentence flow diagrams,” after Gordon Fee’s description in New Testament Exegesis. But if you know a better or more accurate name, let us know!

Two of our own Logos staff are making additional presentations at the ETS/SBL meetings. The presentations listed in this third post are not Logos-related, per se, but we want to support Mike and Rick in what they’re doing “on the side”. :-)

Dr. Mike Heiser, Ph.D., is presenting two papers at ETS. They are both based on his dissertation and discuss the relationship between certain aspects of early Israelite theology, New Testament/Early Church theology, and contemporary controversies. One of Mike’s research interests is questions surrounding the divine council and monotheism in the Old Testament.

I mentioned Rick Brannan’s Logos-related ETS presentation in Part 1 of this series of posts, but he’s also presenting a paper on biblioblogging at SBL. Biblioblog denotes a blog devoted to discussions of the Bible. Rick started Ricoblog over a year ago and PastoralEpistles.com in February 2005. His presentation will relate his experiences in setting up and maintaining these blogs, and present ideas for how to overcome some biblioblogging obstacles.

We have two different data sets that will be made available. If you’re at either the ETS or SBL conferences in November, you can see them demo’d. To keep my sanity (and yours) I’ll only discuss one data set at a time.

This first series of posts will discuss the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament, as implemented within Logos Bible Software.

Interested in utilizing syntax within your study of the New Testament? Read on!

As noted in Part 1, a number of presentations and papers at ETS and SBL will touch on Logos Bible Software in some way.

Four SBL presentations relate to Logos (I covered ETS in Part 1, if you missed it).

On Monday morning (S21-15), check out Dr. Steven Cox’s paper on integrating technology such as Logos Bible Software into the classroom to enhance the teaching and research of biblical Greek.

That afternoon (S21-107), sit in on the Computer Assisted Research session as Dr. Al Lukaszewski discusses and shows his work on a syntactically tagged database he’s developing for Logos. Stick around for a presentation later in that same session by Matthew O’Donnell and Catherine Smith, who are working with the Louw-Nida lexicon to perform computational analysis of the Greek New Testament. O’Donnell is with OpenText.org, our partner in developing a syntactically annotated Greek NT.

Finally, on Tuesday head over to the “Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew” session where you’ll hear from Dr. A. Dean Forbes on how phrase marker analysis of the Hebrew Bible opens up new avenues of research. Logos is partnering with Dr. Francis I. Andersen and Dr. Forbes to make their tagged Hebrew text available so you can do this kind of work, too!

The espresso machine is back! After breaking down sometime in September (that month is nothing more than a hazy, coffeeless memory now) and spending weeks at the repair shop in Canada (don’t ask why we have to take it to Canada when it breaks)…it finally came back last week and is once again caffeinating the good people of Logos.

The first couple of times the machine needed service, we crated and shipped it up to Vancouver. But customs turned out to be a hassle. So now a guy (Caleb) who works in our shipping department has been designated the bearer of the machine. He loads it in his car and drives it north of the border…and back. You might envision four men carrying it on long poles with the tribes of Logos following in procession…but it’s not quite like that…yet.

But we do love our coffee. True story: when the espresso machine came back from the shop this time, the repair guys said that when they opened it up and looked at the counter (shotometer?) inside, they couldn’t believe what they saw. Apparently, the machine has already produced more than 20,000 cups of coffee. The repair guys said it was the most they had ever seen on one machine.